c. 2004 Religion News Service

PHILADELPHIA _ Though not the political force it was in the 1990s, the Christian Coalition and its 30 million voter guides are likely to inspire conservative evangelicals to get to the polls Tuesday, political analysts say.

In battleground states such as Pennsylvania, which President Bush narrowly lost in 2000, the voter guides could play a vital role in helping Republicans mobilize the evangelical vote, a goal President Bush’s campaign strategist, Karl Rove, has identified as a key to victory.

The John Kerry campaign alleges that the voter guides distort the record of the Democratic candidate and are a thinly disguised effort to re-elect Bush.

Both campaigns, as well as independent analysts, concur that with the race so close, turnout could determine the winner. As Florida illustrated in 2000, a few votes in just one state could conceivably make a difference.

The guides, which purport to list candidates’ stances on certain issues, are designed to “intensify feelings rather than persuade,” said Adam Clymer, a former New York Times reporter who is now a political director at the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.

“It’s essentially a newfangled version of the old-fashioned sound trucks,” he said, in which political groups, armed with a megaphone and a message, would troll around their friendly neighborhoods reminding people to vote, Clymer said.

By Election Day, volunteers plan to blanket Pennsylvania with 500,000 voter guides, said Bill Thomson, national field director for the Christian Coalition. Supporters from New Jersey have volunteered this weekend to help pass them out.

While the Christian Coalition says it has printed 30 million voter guides nationally, not all of those will find their way into the hands of voters.

The coalition chapter in Clinton County, located in central Pennsylvania, received 60 boxes of voter guides from the national office this week, said Jon Cassel, who has headed the chapter since 1998.

That’s about 59 more than he needs, Cassel said. He said he’s going to send a few boxes to neighboring counties, and a volunteer from Philadelphia will pick up some more. The rest he’ll just recycle, said Cassel, who has seen the number of Christian Coalition chapters wane in recent years.

In 1994, the Christian Coalition had 60 local chapters in Pennsylvania’s 67 counties, according to a report published that year in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Maybe 15 or 20 remain active, Cassel said. He noted that the coalition’s state office “disbanded” in 1999 or 2000.

In Clinton County, with a population of 37,400, there are 40 to 50 people on the chapter’s mailing list, Cassel said, and 40 churches where he plans to distribute the voter guides.

Yet even without the grass-roots strength it once possessed in Pennsylvania, and nationally, the Christian Coalition still has sway among conservatives, said John C. Green, a longtime observer of religion and politics and a professor at the University of Akron in Ohio.

“People still know the name and they still get the voter guides,” Green said.

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Part of the recognition stems from a series of controversies and legal problems:

_ In 2000, the Nebraska chapter office of the coalition asked churches not to distribute its voter guides after admitting that they misrepresented the stance of candidates on some issues. The inaccuracies were unintentional, the coalition said.

_ In 1998, the Internal Revenue Service ruled that group, founded by religious broadcaster Pat Robertson, was not entitled to a tax exemption as a “religious organization.”

_ In 1996, the Federal Election Commission sued the coalition for “express advocacy” on behalf of Republican candidates, arguing that the group’s voter guides essentially amounted to an “in kind” campaign contribution. A federal judge dismissed some of the charges but ruled the organization had crossed the line in at least two races for public office. The coalition paid $45,000 to settle the matter, said Ian Stirton, an FEC spokesman.

This year, the coalition’s guide, which contrasts the positions of Kerry and Bush on 15 “key faith and family issues,” has drawn protests from liberal watchdog groups like the Washington-based Interfaith Alliance, which objects to the way the guides frame the issues.

Employing phrases such as “abortion on demand” to describe a candidate’s stance is more akin to discussing “coded slogans” than policy positions, a statement from IA said.

Other allegedly loaded voter guide phrases are “affirmative action programs that provide preferential treatment” and “federal firearms regulations and licensing of gun owners.”

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According to the Kerry campaign, this year’s guide distorts the candidate’s views.

Michael Meehan, a senior official for the Kerry campaign, said the guide, for example, lists Kerry as “opposed” to a permanent extension of the $1,000 child tax credit, an attribution he called “patently false.”

“Kerry has voted 19 times to extend the child tax credit while in the Senate,” Meehan said.

The Christian Coalition political director who wrote the guide, Drew McKissick, said he gave the Kerry campaign ample opportunity to respond to the group’s survey, but it did not, while the Bush campaign did.

Without Kerry’s response, McKissick said, Christian Coalition lobbyists and legislative directors in Washington studied his Senate voting records to determine his positions.

“If they are going to go and complain,” McKissick said of campaign officials, “they have no one to blame but themselves. We sent them a survey, which would have made his position on these issues perfectly clear, but they chose not to avail themselves of that particular opportunity.”

Meehan said that Kerry did not respond to the survey because campaign officials view the Christian Coalition as “essentially a political arm of the Bush campaign.”

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